Homeschooling Helps Develop Empathy in Children

Caring how others feel is a bit of two-edged sword and that's why most people seem to shun developing empathy. When we care how others feel and want to help them meet their needs we find these often clash with what we want or need for ourselves. It's a moral minefield - for adults as well as children. I believe we start life with an instinct for justice but it's eroded by life's lessons. As parents we often justify selfishness to our children, sometimes without even being aware of it. A certain amount of 'self'ishness is necessary to develop a strong sense of self identity and to determine who 'I' am within the crowd, or we get lost to peer group pressure from an early age. I feel that is the relative social isolation of young homeschooled children that avoids this dilemma.

With my own children I tried to stick to the Golden Rule... I'd ask them to think about "how I would feel or think if someone acted that way toward me or if it happened to me, right now". I add the 'right now' because it made them place themselves in that other person's place immediately - it was a powerful exercise in imagination. It took time - this isn't something you can do in a moment. It takes longer than telling a child off, or threatening them, or bribing them ("if you be nice you'll be a nice person and people will like you") Sometimes I'd need to take half an hour out of our day to imagine what it would be like in someone else's position.

Where possible I'd include these little imaginative journeys any where in our lives - while going for a walk, driving in the car, playing games together, exploring our backyard or the local community. I felt it was important to develop this ability early.

Sometimes though we get hurt by others and we learn, little by little, to shut down our empathy, to protect ourselves. It takes a great effort to stay vulnerable. From what I've seen and learned though, it's those most willing to stay vulnerable that are the happiest folk in life.

© Beverley Paine 2006

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Let's Create a Booklist of 'Must Read' or 'Essential' Homeschooling Books

After reading a post on the Homeschool Australia Frequently Asked Questions email support group I began wondering: what 'how to homeschool' books do we all consider essential reading - books that have enlightened, encouraged and reassured us, that have given us invaluable tips that saved time and worry, or books that changed the way we think about education and made the task of explaining our choices to others much easier.

When April was four years of age (in the mid 80s) I read John Holt's How Children Learn and How Children Fail and that set the tone and direction of my thinking on the education process. Before that I dogeared a copy of Your Baby and Child, a classic parenting book by Penelope Leach, so perhaps my thoughts were already on that path and I was primed to accept his ideas. Holt's writing style is anecdotal - he reflects on his observations so that gives his books authenticity - he talks about what he experiences first hand. Letters from homeschooling parents and friends about their experiences help to illustrate his ideas. Although the basic ideas were fairly challenging back then because of the way I'd been schooled to believe in schools and teaching, I found echoes in my own experience, both as a child, teenager, adult and parent. I think John Holt helped me to look at my experiences in a different way and to draw different conclusions. It is this widening of my awareness that I'm still grateful for two decades later.

After a couple of years of homeschooling I read a book by Mario Pagnini, a homeschooling dad. He had a list of 'qualifications' to home educate in the early chapters, one which read "You must like your child." Everyone loves their child, but homeschooling requires that you like your child, that you want to be with them all day, every day. That made me realise that it's perfectly normal to not like our own children. Later I read a uni text book on child development and found out about temperamental mismatch and the havoc it can cause in family relationships. Mario's book curbed my enthusiasm to convert everyone I came across to the cause of homeschooling!

Better Late Than Early, a classic by Raymond and Dorothy Moore, early homeschooling pioneers, is a book that has given much reassurance to many families, particular those whose children seem to be reluctant to start intellectual study by age five...

There were so few books about home education when we began and now there are thousands! Many, like my own Getting Started with Homeschool book focus on the practical aspects. Of this kind I think Ann Lahrson Fisher's The Fundamentals of Homeschooling is the most thorough and could sit on the shelf alongside books that promote any method of homeschooling such as Classical, Montessori, Charlotte Mason or Steiner. Then there are books that combine the basics with an approach such as unschooling or eclectic and using unit studies and learning centres by authors such as Anna Kealoha, Gareth Lewis as well as the books produced by Linda Dobson's Prima Publishing's Homeschooling series. I've only read a handful of Charlotte Mason inspired homeschooling books and love the emphasis on developing habits and routines, and the way in which they honour the nature of childhood, placing children at the centre of the learning process but without the focus on individualism that can occur with other approaches. Then there are books that focus solely on a particular homeschooling approach such as Steiner or Classical education.

Wouldn't it be great to have a list of 'classics' or must read books - half a dozen gems - that we could recommend to families interested in homeschooling?

I'd want to include at least one book that considers the political nature of homeschooling and schooling: John Taylor Gatto's Dumbing Us Down is a classic, and it's less US focussed than his epic The Underground History of American Schooling, but I personally prefer Canadian homeschooling pioneer and advocate Wendy Preisnitz's compact and succinct Challenging Assumptions in Education. Wendy was the leader of the Green Party in Canada for a couple of years and has published Natural Life, an alternative lifestyles magazine for more than two decades, as well as Life Learning. She gets to the point quickly and has much to say that is very thought provoking. Unsettling, but essential reading for anyone! It's not a book about homeschooling, it's a book about the way society uses schools to promote particular attitudes and values that aren't meant to serve the whole of humanity.

Many homeschooling families pick up a copy of Grace Llewellyn's The Teenage Liberation Handbook at some stage. It's a book that I think we should all read when our children are tiny, rather than leave it until their in their teens. Her book, written in her twenties, speaks to the teenager in all of us, but more than that she shows us that we don't have to stay stock in whatever dogma was written for us educationally in the past. It's a book which, through anecdotes of real first hand experiences, demonstrates that their are many pathways to the adult world of work. Grace's book was both reassuring and challenging: it helped me to treat my children as unique individuals and to learn about their learning styles, needs and interests. The Teenage Liberation Handbook reinforced John Holt's message of trust the children.

It looks like my list would include a general, but comprehensive nuts and bolts 'how to homeschool' book; a book that provided reassurance that our kids will graduate homeschooling and become valued and useful citizens; a book that covers the basic underlying philosophy of home education - that of life learning and personal responsibility for the educational process and our reasons for the rejection of the principles behind compulsory mass schooling. We also seem to need a book that lays out a basic curriculum - a guide to follow in that first year or so: what to do when, but without needing to spend hundreds of dollars on a particular curriculum as most of us soon change our ideas!

Let's create that list! If you email me your choices I'll compile them into a list on my website, and post the file in the Files section of the Homeschool Australia FAQ group's yahoo website.

© Beverley Paine 2006

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Why Homeschoolers Need to Learn to Translate Everyday Activities into Educational Jargon

Learning to translate every day life activities into educational jargon was a turning point for me in understanding the nature of learning naturally. Before then I thought it was my role to provide a huge smorgasbord of activities and knowledge in the hope that my children would find something to excite or interest them. This led to 'burn out' and I felt like I was continually in danger of falling into the trap of edutainment - needing to make learning fun in order to capture their enthusiasm and keep attention high. I felt like an overworked teacher, but with only three children instead of thirty!

Burn out was actually good - it taught me that when I didn't do anything at all, because I was emotionally and intellectually drained, the children still learned an amazing amount, especially the things I considered core values and skills, the stuff around the house, like chores, taking care of each other, looking after pets, etc. I realised that when they initiated activities I didn't need to be involved much at all, except in a peripheral way, hovering in the background, mainly gathering and supplying resources. I spent a lot of time sorting LEGO bricks to enable them to quickly build fantastic models and layouts!

I discovered children are like sponges. When kept wet they don't seem to mop up much at all, but leave them alone and when a puddle happens they soak up so much. I realised that my job was to stop interfering and intervening so much and got rid of the hot-house, smorgasbord approach to education. Let them get on with the business of learning. Our house is an amazingly interesting place, largely because Robin and I are reasonably interesting people with consumate passions of our own. This is what the children needed - a background buzz of productive activityin an atmosphere that celebrated learning.

There are many things we wanted our children to learn. I think it is within the scope of the 'Natural Learning' approach to bring resources and activities in our children's life that they would otherwise not come across or think of by themselves. I'm sure that children would never clean their teeth if we did not insist! It's the same with teaching children how to do simple sums on paper, in order for them to be able to do more complicated sums, should the need ever arrive. First the children watch us clean our teeth meticulously every night, or listen as we calculate simple sums aloud whenever we have the need. Then we invite them to have a go, an an appropriate age for the development (eg being able to get that brush into their mouths with their chubby arms, or gradually introducing simple questions such as "how many people want juice? One, two, three. Can you get three cups please." And so on as the child grows.

It's easy to come up with examples for tots because most of us are really attuned to what and how they are learning at this age! The trick is to begin to think like this again for our older children.

© Beverley Paine 2006

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Put some happiness in your pocket!

Take a piece of paper and write on it, HAPPINESS, three times.

The first time, write it quite small, then the next bigger and the third the biggest of all.

Fold the piece of paper, put it in your pocket and forget all about it as you go on with the day's work.

Do it now - don't procrastinate!

This is a very simple, but powerful way, to remind your subconscious to focus on those thoughts and activities that create happiness. Little by little you will find your life becoming more joyful and your step a little lighter!

Several years ago I bought some bright yellow paper party plates with smiley faces. I hung them in every room, especially opposite entrances. It was always hard not to smile back!

© Beverley Paine 2006

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Everyone can Homeschool: Intelligence and Educational Knowledge isn't a Prerequisite for Starting to Teach Your Children at Home

A friend recently said, "It's okay for you to homeschool Beverley, you know what you are doing, but what about people who didn't finish school, who aren't so intellignet?"

I get this a lot and it bugs me. These people usually know me as I am today, not twenty years ago when I began homeschooling. They haven't been on the entire journey with us.

I don't think 'intelligence', or 'intelligent homeschooling' as a concept, is necessarily a prerequisite for homeschooling. I've met parents who haven't got a clue about how to educate their children and operate from a really basic position for the first year or so. They're refugees from the system, usually desperate and unwilling homeschoolers, but left without any other sane choice. These parents operate on one principle only in those early weeks and months: the need to protect their children. These are folks who haven't heard of attachment parenting or alternative educational approaches and philosophies. They just want their children to be able to learn to spell and calculate in an environment that respects their uniqueness... Over time, with support, these families discover that home educating educates them - in short, they begin to use their natural intelligence, long since atrophied, often thanks to the kind of school experiences they endured. Ultimately 'intelligent homeschooling' evolves, but it can take several years!

The best thing about homeschooling is that we're always learning: if something doesn't work we don't have any compelling reason not to dump it and try something else. Schools don't have this freedom. We're answerable to ourselves and our children. We don't have to implement methods or teach our children things they don't need to know simply because it's in the curriculum, or because the parent body think it's a good idea (educational fashions and fads abound in schools, and once they take hold they're hard to get rid of, even if it's obvious they don't work). Homeschoolers move much more quickly through the silly stuff and begin working with children on an individual basis, thus accelerating the learning process and making it more meaningful. Homeschooling is largely a self-correcting approach to education!

The other thing that all homeschoolers do, whether in a deliberate and conscious way like me, or simply because they come up against an problem and need to find solutions, is continually learn about the process of education. Because we're not teaching one age group every year, our understanding of how children learn and grow is constantly challenged - unlike school teachers. This keeps us on our feet. Collectively we've built up a considerable knowledge base and most of what we've learned over the last 30-40 years is now online on the internet. There are hundreds of thousands of pages dedicated to how children learn in just about any enviroment, from homes, to caravans, to boats, to tents, to classes... We're at the forefront of educational research - a living laboratory experiment. The world of school is beginning to sit up and take notice of our successes, while doing their level best to make us to conform to methods and ideas that have simply outlived their usefulness!

© Beverley Paine 2006

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Visit www.alwayslearningbooks.com.au for a great range of homeschooling, unschooling and books on natural learning!